Abu Ali al-Anbari

Abu Ali al-Anbari was the Governor of the Islamic State territories in Syria under Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Formerly a Major-General of the Iraqi Army under Saddam Hussein and a veteran military man, Abu Ali was considered to be ISIS' second-in-command.

Biography
Abu Ali al-Anbari was born in Mosul, Nineveh Governorate, Iraq to a family of Sunni Muslim Turkmen, and he was formerly a physics teacher and a member of the Iraqi Ba'ath Party. He was a Major-General under Saddam Hussein's government, and he was a veteran of the Gulf War and the 2003 Iraq War against the United States. After the US occupation of Iraq, Abu Ali al-Anbari briefly served in Ansar al-Islam before joining the al-Qaeda in Iraq group under Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. With the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, Abu Ali became one of the leaders of the group and was given command of their military forces fighting in the Syrian Civil War in 2014. Despite being a member of the shura council, he had a limited knowledge of sharia law, and he was replaced as the second-in-command of the Islamic State by Abu Ala al-Afri. On 12 May 2015, al-Afri was reported dead in an airstrike, which could mean that al-Anbari returned to being second-in-command; Anbari himself was reported dead in a 12 December 2015 Iraqi Air Force airstrike, but he was confirmed to be in a hospital recovering from injuries sustained in the airstrike.